Don't Look NowMature

That evening, a single man arrives at his door with two metal suitcases. He has a lot of hair. No further description is necessary.

Marty shows the man up to his bedroom where the man begins to assemble the surveillance post. He works slowly but doesn’t seem to mind that Marty is watching.

“Do you want some tea,” Marty finally asks.

The man looks up. “Erm,” he says. “Nah.”

“Right.”

The man fiddles with a few wires and then says, “I’ll have some scotch though.”

“Would you.” Marty’s response is emotionless. But he is already laughing inside. But this is how the straight face must operate.

“Plain scotch?” he asks after a moment.

“Yah,” the man says, grunting as he reaches his hairy arms around the camera stand to reach a dangling wire. “Just whatever you’ve got man.”

“I’ve got tea,” Marty says.

The man makes a sour face. “Right.” He pauses. “Nah.”

Marty smiles. “Single malt?” he asks.

The man grunts again. It’s a lot of work to plug wires into the equipment. “You got some?”

“Yah. Single malt tea.”

The man looks mildly confused and seriously downcast. “Right.” He fiddles with a wire. “Nah.”

Marty sighs. “Its ginger chai. Burns going down, I guarantee.”

The man sniffs expressively. “Nah.”

“Blended malt?” he asks, eagerly awaiting the man’s response.

“Uh…ya…is it…” the man lifts an awfully heavy AAA battery off the floor with a grunt, “is it alcoholic?”

“Tea? Yes.”

The man frowns. “Right…Burns going down you say?”

“Ginger chai? Yes.”

“That’s the stuff then.”

“Excellent. I’ll put the kettle on.” Marty leaves the room.

After feeding the man some 'double-malt-highly-alcoholic' ginger chai tea and some 'highly-caffeinated-sugar-invested-fat-plus' bran cookies, Marty is shown how to use the surveillance post.

The man is a little giddy though because of those eight shots; a little more can fit in a princess tea cup than a typical shot glass. And they’d downed two pots of the juice.

Marty is deeply satisfied with his actions and is duly amazed at how gullible the man is and how his mind can fool itself with just the idea of alcohol. Marty had only added a drop of scotch and some cream to cloud the tea. And then he had played along as if he had had plenty of practice elsewhere. And now that the man thinks he’s drunk, it just makes everything so much more interesting. Yes. Marty has decided to come to terms with interesting.

And as soon as the man leaves, Marty finds himself sitting in his dark room watching a monitor. He doesn’t have to be on guard. The video is streamed live to the police headquarters. But Marty is too curious, and he is almost certain that he will see a show tonight.

Marty busies himself with a handheld game of Tetris while the monitor radiates an eerie glow across his face. He hasn’t once seen the suspect, though he has a view across the man’s entire living room. Perhaps he is not home.

It is one thirty in the morning when something finally happens. But it is a lot closer to home than he was expecting. In fact, the sound is on his front porch. Literally.

He walks down the stairs in his bare feet, wishing he had a baseball bat in his hands. Not for safety, but so that he could play the stereotypical role of someone inspecting a possible break in. If only he was also a half naked woman in a bath robe. Maybe that was taking the role a little too far. Regardless, Marty approaches his darkened living room window with a shaky amount of stealth.

He peers between the blinds, but it takes him a while to see the intruder. And then he spots him.

There is a man in his crab apple tree. The man is dressed in all black except for a purple ski mask. This is likely a spontaneous outing then. No one wearing that many chains and bling would settle for a purple ski mask. But the interesting detail to note is the man’s attention. He is gazing through binoculars into the main room of Marty’s neighbor’s house.

Before Marty can decide what to do, the man falls out of the tree. Marty widens his eyes as the man lands on his feet. It would be a far stretch to say the man had jumped from the tree. Perhaps he purposefully fell then. No, not even. And falling with style would be far too much credit. How about, by coincidence, he happened to fall when he wanted to.

The man then ‘creeps’ across the lawn, but he is more like a bear on its hind legs in fast forward. Marty has to watch where this is leading, but because of the fence, he has to follow where this is leading. So he slips from his front door and moves across the lawn.

The man ‘creeps’ up the side lawn of Marty’s neighbor’s house, and Marty follows a few rose bushes behind. This could get good.

The man practices the level of stealth commonly reserved for drunk GI Joe characters, his heavy boots leaving imprints in the soft grass; if there was an overhead branch, he would smack his head on it. Marty follows like a mouse hunter, sniffing the air and making note of the bent blades of grass that lie broken and muddied in the foot prints left by the gangster thief. The trail is so fresh it stinks.

But then the man pauses, gazing through a first floor window like a casual window shopper. Unsatisfied, the suspicious intruder continues along the side of the house to the back yard. And that is when a frightening shadow falls over the pair.

Spiked hair, a turned head, a big tail, surely there must be fangs within that shadow.

Story summary

This is a comedy. Some would say it is 'doomed' to be a comedy. But things could change. There is a far-fetched plot device in the future that could change that. But right now, poor Marty is doomed to be comical. Go ahead. Laugh. He'll love you for it. But stop reading this for hints and get cracking on the real text. Because otherwise, you'll get left behind. I am going to be writing 50,000 words this November alone. That's my challenge. Your challenge is to READ 50,000 words in a month.

This is a comedy. Some would say it is 'doomed' to be a comedy. But things could change. There is a far-fetched plot device in the future that could change that. But right now, poor Marty is doomed to be comical. Go ahead. Laugh. He'll love you for it.

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